Good Old Games was a website I used to have a lot of time for. They would take ancient PC games that were an absolute bitch to get running on modern systems, get it running and then provide a DRM free installer so that instead of having to mess with things like DOSBox you could just double click an icon and be playing Ultima 7, for example, in seconds. I do think that charging 10 dollars for a game from 1992 is sort of dogshit but whatever, better than nothing I suppose.
One thing that Good Old Games likes to harp on about is the fact that they are preserving video games. That they are force for good in the gaming space by making old games accessible for all. Maybe at one point that was true. I remember a long time ago they had some kind of legal bother over the Fallout games and their response to being told to take the games off their storefront was to make the games completely free for like a week before they were pulled. Obviously, to continue their efforts they have to fall in line with this bullshit but they did everything they could to make sure their installers for Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics got on as many computers as possible. I'm not 100% certain that's exactly what happened but that's how I understood it at the time and that's what drew me to the website in the first place. "It sucks that this happened, but have it for free and keep it forever"
But fast foward to today and it's a different story. Warcraft 3 recently got an, apparently, shoddy remake from Blizzard and what I'm assuming is a result of this remake being launched, GoG were told to pull their Battle.net edition of the game from their store. So did they make it free for as many people to download as possible before it's gone? No, they made multiple social media posts about how the game is being pulled, how "they care" about preservation and that you can buy the game for 15 bucks, maybe a bit less if you use a discount code from their Facebook post comment section. "Look at this thing we failed to preserve in any meaningful way, give us money before it's gone though!"
It just rings so hollow to me as soon as they start charging money for it. Unwilling to do anything about it other than advertise its dwindling avaliability hoping that a few 30-40 year olds will open their wallets in light of the news. An easy way to prey on people's nostalgia or computer illiteracy as a method to make a quick buck. I was willing to pay for the convienience prior to this because I was under the impression that when push came to shove they would throw down but instead they shook the silver cup in our face and demanded payment for them not doing their fucking job.
If you want to know where the real preservation efforts lie, it's unfortunately in piracy. The thankless, sometimes dangerous (in a litigation sense) work of making sure that as many games from the artforms history aren't lost to time and aren't lost to shit-head companies pulling crap like this so they can make a few extra sales of poorly put together or uneeded remakes and remasters. There are plenty of sites doing it that I will refuse to name here because being underground is what helps keep them alive but THOSE are the people you should be rallying around. The people making emulators, the people dumping ROMs, the people provding these old games for free and providing instructions for the less tech-savvy to get them running. That's true preservation
Maybe all this is just overly cynical ranting from someone reading way too far into a shitty piece of news about Warcraft 3. That said though, as far as I'm concerned, GoG don't care about preservation, they care about exploiting your nostalgia to make a line on a graph go up
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